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We are, however, obliged honestly to say that, however highly creditable to its designer as an ingenious and capable mechanism, it shows that he has never realized to himself as a practical artillerist the primary, most absolute, and indispensable conditions of construction for a serviceable muzzle-pivoting gun for either land or sea service.
This is in brief the muzzle-pivoting part of the arrangement, of which, were it worth while to go into its details, we should need some further diagrams to make it quite clear.
As to the general merits, or general conditions, of muzzle-pivoting, however, once in doubt at first, these are admitted now by all; and the latter resolve themselves almost into this that system of muzzle-pivoting must be best which, while preserving the essential point of leaving the muzzle of the gun free of any direct attachment, i.e., with an imaginary, not an actual, pivot of vertical arc motion, shall be the simplest possible in its parts, have the least details, the fewest parts capable of being struck by splinters or shot, and all its parts of such materials and character as to receive the smallest amount of injury if so struck.
It is a common boast of Prussian military men, that within the space of eight days 848,000 men can be concentrated to the defense of any single point within the kingdom, and every man of them will be a trained and well-equipped soldier. Improved Muzzle-Pivoting Gun. We are indebted for the following able description and criticism of this Prussian gun to our able contemporary, The Engineer.
Viewed as a piece of mechanism, nothing can well be more beautiful in mutual adaptation of parts to the fulfillment of given and rather recondite movements, and in point of execution, than this muzzle-pivoting arrangement of Herr Gruson's; but having said this we are compelled to add, as impartial engineering critics, that it is nothing more.
As a carefully thought out and elaborated piece of elegant mechanical complication Herr Gruson's muzzle-pivoting carriage attracted much attention at Paris, in 1867, and its merits were regarded as great by those whose thoughts went little further perhaps. We should have been glad had it been in our power to have joined in its praise.
With parts and movements far more ingeniously adapted than those of the crude and unskillfully designed muzzle-pivoting carriages of Captain Heathorn, also exhibited at Paris, and much exhibited and exposed since, the Gruson mounting is even more complicated, expensive, and liable to injury of every sort to which a gun carriage can be conceived liable.
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